Thursday, December 27, 2012

Character Creation
In my opinion, character creation in SWTOR is somewhat the same as regular MMOs and there's nothing too fancy about it.

Server Selection

Faction

Class Choice

Species

Gender

Appearance

There's the usual server selection followed by faction, class choices, species, gender and finally appearance customizations that you have to plough through before you can start playing. And since they're just the regular stuff, I guess I can spare you the agony of repeating it and totally skip most of them apart from the class choices.

Class
From what I can tell regarding class choices, there are four classes available for each of the two factions, Republic and Sith. And basically, apart from naming-sense and some minor discrepancies, you can somewhat think of the four classes from one faction having a mirrored counterpart in the other.

For simplicity's sake, please refer to the following class comparisons:

Anyway, think carefully and choose well for the class you've decided upon will stick with you for life...or at least for the most of your SWTOR career. That is until you get bored and decide to create another character and play a different class of course.

You know...on hindsight, I can't help but notice that SWTOR's character creation system does give off the same feel as that of The Secret World's. Both of the games appear to have a somewhat limited array of character customization options. Additionally, none of them have hairstyle options that are longer than shoulder length.

So I suspect that the reason for these limitations might also be due to its attempt at wanting to add the player's own character into the quest conversations. However, in contrast with The Secret World's implementation, I kind of feel that SWTOR did a better job at it.

Not only did they implement conversation choices which allows us to at times alter the reactions that we get from the NPCs we're interacting with, sometimes we would even get to direct the outcome of an encounter. Like for example, allowing a defeated quest foe to live or die due to the choices we make in the conversation.

And on top of that, compared to TSW's still and silent characters, SWTOR's characters had motions (in terms of gestures) as well as speak with the NPC so much so that it becomes a real conversation rather than a one-person show (they've even bothered to hire voice actors/actresses to give life to our characters).